Lincoln Highway road trip minus 3: Weehawken, NJ, and the start of the Lincoln Highway.
Last Thursday night, on a simply gorgeous late spring day, I met up with my daughter Katherine in NY, headed over to Jersey City to collect her car and granddaughter Isabelle, and we drove via Hoboken (a favorite of mine) to Hamilton Park in Weehawken along the Palisades in what they call the Heights. Lots of families were out, a group of teens stopped off for prom pictures and it otherwise had such a nice feeling to it up there at the park. The weather sure helped – we just don’t get too many balmy evenings like that in the SF Bay Area.
There’s an impressive collection of historic homes right by the park – there are some real jewels. Anyway, this was the first time there for both of us, despite its close proximity. I can see the Weehawken Heights from the conference room at the firm (Morrison & Foerster’s New York office moved to 55th between Broadway and 8th at the edge of Hell’s Kitchen in 2014 – my how the world changes – it’s like the big English firms now located in Shoreditch in London). What an absolutely spectacular view. This is where the original route of the Lincoln Highway began. The cars would exit the ferry and drive up to the Heights to begin the journey. I am posting these in color; the golden hour light was too pretty to convert these to black and white.
That’s Katherine with Isabelle (in her Grateful Dead dress) in one of them with their backs to us. (I can confirm that I did not play the Dead for her – they never were a favorite. Mostly we would listen to the Beatles on the drive to school in the morning in our Berkeley days, and I would quiz the kids about the identity of the singer. It’s an important life skill to be able to tell the difference between a John song, a Paul song and a George song.)
There’s a World War I memorial up there (which seems appropriate to post on the Memorial Day bank holiday weekend) and, of course, along Hamilton Street, adjoining Hamilton Park, the memorial to Alexander Hamilton (and not to that villain Aaron Burr). Why here? Near the spot of the memorial is where the infamous duel between Burr and Hamilton took place on July 12, 1804, at the Weehawken Dueling Grounds; Hamilton shot his pistol into the air, and Burr supposedly took dead aim at Hamilton (rather than firing into the air or the ground and ending it with honor intact) and mortally wounded him. It should be noted that historians dispute the exact chain of events, but I will give Hamilton the benefit of the doubt. Hamilton died the next day and is buried at Trinity Churchyard in lower Manhattan. The actual rock on which Hamilton’s head rested after he was shot is said to be part of the monument.
Union City and Jersey City, NJ, along the Lincoln Highway, next post.
